New Developments in Streaming Technology

Deploying a setup in the cloud can vastly enhance the flexibility of your setup. This blog post marks the start of a series in which we will explain how to deploy Unified Origin in the cloud, from scratch. It offers guidance and sheds light on several best practices that we have developed based on our own research and the experiences of our customers.

With the latest release of the Unified Streaming Platform, it becomes possible to do Dynamic Ad Insertion for Live. This new solution is based on industry practices and relies on SCTE 35 markers to signal advertisement opportunities, in combination with third-party ad services that insert the actual ads. For most existing setups that use Unified Origin for Live this solution will be straightforward to implement.

DRM is not a static technology. As part of the continuous fight against piracy, stricter requirements on content security are developed and implemented. We now introduce support for a next step in content protection: DRM with multiple keys, which is recommended by Google's Widevine and Microsoft's PlayReady, and provides the only viable way to offer the highest level of DRM protection.

Media segments that form the output of a Live encoder must be properly 'ingested' by the server that will deliver the stream, i.e. the 'origin'. We believe it is time to further standardize this 'Live ingest' step in order to improve interoperability between services and devices and increase the reliability of Live streaming setups across the industry.

For those with a visual or hearing impairment, watching videos is not necessarily a great experience. Accessibility features allow people with such impairments to consume video content in a meaningful way. By adding them to your streaming service, you can increase its 'availability' in the broad sense, by not only delivering your content to all devices, but for all people as well.

Metadata is vital to video streaming and adaptive bitrate streaming would not be possible without it. Using timed metadata adds even more flexibility, and enables use cases like dynamic ad insertion and other smart behavior.

The 2017 edition of one of the biggest trade shows in the broadcasting business is behind us. This blog post provides an overview of interesting topics presented at this year's International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam, with new products from Cedexis, Mux and Hybrik, amongst others.

As the latest release of the Unified Streaming Platform adds full WebVTT support for offline and dynamic packaging, all major delivery formats for text tracks in HTTP video streaming are now supported. To help you choose the right format, this blog post provides a guide through the maze of their profiles and specifications. From WebVTT to TTML and from embedded to burned-in subtitles.

Every successful video streaming setup needs to support multiple playout formats and we believe that dynamic packaging is the only viable approach to do so. To explain why, we present 10 advantages of a dynamic solution, compared to serving static, prepackaged content.

From April 25th onwards, when Chrome 58 is scheduled for release, DRM encrypted video streams served from a non-secure origin will no longer work in Google's browser. Soon, Mozilla will implement similar changes to Firefox. This blog post serves as a last-minute reminder for those who have not yet made the necessary changes.

No one likes 404s, yet many in the video streaming industry seem reluctant to adopt a DASH feature that combats them: using timestamps on a timeline to signal media segments, instead of merely numbering them. Our Unified Origin makes use of this approach by default and this blog post explains why, by presenting an in depth look at the many benefits of DASH's SegmentTimeline.

Unified Remix 'mixes' clips from various sources into a single stream without a loss in compatibility, marking the next step in the evolution of streaming media. This blog post goes into the details of a Remix setup and explains how our choice to containerize each of its components, allows you to deploy it with only one command.

Both live and on-demand streaming have their own requirements, which are dependent on the specifics of the service offered to viewers. This blog details the most common scenarios, for live as well as VOD, and offers a look at some of their specific server, storage and network needs.

CMAF is a move towards a future with one video streaming format. Although that step is to be applauded, CMAF isn't the uniform video streaming nirvana that some had hoped for. However, with software like Unified Origin, the lack of a truly uniform format is less of a burden than one might think.

The next generation mobile network, sometimes referred to as 5G, targets extremely ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sub-millisecond latency, 10-100 times higher data rates, 10-100 times more devices and 1000 times higher mobile data volume. This blog post presents some of the technologies under development and details how they can improve the deployment and efficiency of streaming video in mobile networks.

The development of the 5G mobile network in Europe falls under certain research and development projects sponsored by the 5G public private partnerships (5GPPP) consortium under the European commission. Unified Streaming has joined one of these large scale projects, the Superfluidity H2020 project.

Because of Apple's recently announced support for the fragmented MP4 format in HLS on iOS 10, a CMAF presentation can potentially support both MPEG DASH and HLS streaming. In this blog, we try to summarize the scope of this new format and what it implies for typical video streaming workflows.